Moving Poems

Footage of a performance by Brazilian sound-poet Márcio-André. Brazil has had a thriving avant-garde poetry culture for decades, so I thought it only fitting to pay tribute to it here on Moving Poems at the end of a week featuring Brazilian videopoetry.

Many of Márcio-André’s projects don’t require a grasp of Portuguese to appreciate, being more sound than poetry. One that I found especially intriguing is his online Dot-Matrix Symphony. The instructions say (I think) to push play and then pause for all nine videos, then when they’ve all downloaded, start them going as close to simultaneously as possible.

Video documentation of a typographic installation in public restrooms by the Mexican poet Julián Herbert. The music is “Mind map”, by Jar G. This project forms part of the activities of a collective for visual and kinetic poetry known as El Taller de la Caballeriza.

The first poem says, “To translate is to {invent the light/arrange the voice} on the other side of the mirror.”

Avant-garde videopoem by Eric Gamalinda, “constructed out of images shot randomly around new york city.”

Poem and film by Gabriel Vallecillo, a young Honduran poet and filmmaker “currently exploring VJing poetry and applying poetry to Live Cinema performances,” according to his Vimeo profile. About the video, he says on its YouTube page: “Explora la ausencia del ser humano en este mundo hiperreal blanqueado” (It explores the absence of the human being in this hyper-real, bleached-out world).

Curiously, a lack of Portuguese doesn’t seem much of a barrier to appreciating these fun word-art pieces. Brazilians invented concrete poetry, so it only seems fair to represent them here. The YouTube description says (I think): Audiovisual adaptations of the concrete poems “Cinco” by José Lino Grunewald (1964), “Velocidade” by Ronald Azeredo (1957), “Cidade” by Augusto de Campos (1963), “Pêndulo” by E.M. de Melo e Castro (1961/62), and “O Organismo” by Décio Pignatari (1960). Director: Christian Caselli.

Video by Natalie d’Arbeloff

I think it’s interesting how the poem here is intrinsic to the film itself; the text would be difficult to extract and fairly meaningless as a static object without the interplay with the images.